We always hear about how polarized the country is, but on most of
the big issues there’s a clear public mandate to go in a certain
direction. Congress just needs to listen.

The budget is a
good example. A Jan. 30 Reason-Rupe poll asked respondents what the
country spends too much money on, and the most popular response — at 21
percent, the winner by several points — was “defense/military/wars.”
Another category they called “ObamaCare” got 3 percent. Ask fans of
multibillion-dollar defense contracts to explain that result to you and
you’ll get a blank stare.

In other words, as with immigration
reform, marriage equality and just about every other issue Congress is
dealing with today, the public is way ahead of Washington.

Defenders
of the status quo won’t tell you this. They want to present the issue
as strictly about stark threats and existential crises and the need for
more spending. Every dollar in cuts from the Pentagon’s massive budget,
they say, makes us less safe. Many ideologues can’t find a penny for
education but refuse to save money on their favorite weapons system.

The
American people have seen through this ruse. The question isn’t whether
we should reduce Pentagon spending. That debate is already settled. The
bad years of the George W. Bush era are over. The question is how we
cut wisely and make sure we help people in the military sector
transition as smoothly as possible to new jobs and careers.

As The
Washington Post recently reported, “Since 2001, the base defense budget
has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion — and that’s before
accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.”
That’s right — the cost of the wars isn’t even included in what we think
of as the Pentagon budget. President Bush made sure that accounting was
done off the books. We’ve been paying for that decision ever since, and
we’ll be paying for it many years down the line.

The
Congressional Progressive Caucus, which I co-chair, introduced the Back
to Work Budget in February to help solve this problem. We bring our
troops home from Afghanistan and return the Pentagon budget to its 2006
level. We don’t cut from military personnel wages. Pensions and
benefits, including Tricare, are untouched. The big savings come from
reducing needless outsourcing and preventing excessive payments to third
parties, which often create the biggest cost overruns.

We get
more savings by decommissioning our Cold War nuclear weapons stockpile,
another expensive boondoggle you never hear about. We’ve been spending
money for decades on maintaining nuclear warheads that everyone knows
will never be launched. That money could have been better used just
about anywhere else.

The logic of a big military budget goes
something like this: “There will always be threats, and we never know
what China, Russia, North Korea or some other actor will do in a few
years. Keeping our spending high now means preventing wars later. We
can’t put a price tag on security.”

We all remember the Bush
years, so I leave it up to the reader to decide whether this is a fair
description of the argument. The problem with this thinking is that the
Pentagon budget, just like any other budget, isn’t a single big number —
it’s a collection of individual programs, projects and price tags. When
it comes to military spending, these price tags just keep growing.
Anyone who calls herself a fiscal conservative should be asking whether
that growth is justified, not protecting the Pentagon from calls for
more responsible budgeting.

Confusing every dollar spent by the
Pentagon with another dollar keeping us safe at night is a rhetorical
trick, pure and simple. There will not be another major land war in
Europe, Asia or anywhere else in our lifetimes. Economic pressures have
reached a point where war is simply not in any country’s best interest.
It’s certainly not in the interest of a country like China, often cited
by saber-rattlers as a potential future enemy. Yet we spend more on our
military than the next 19 top spenders combined. In that huge figure, is
there really no money worth saving?

1 comment on this story

This is far from surprising. Grijalva has clearly established that he is trying to sabotage this country, her security, and her way of life. A weakened military would only serve to bring this country closer to being on its needs, which is exactly what Grijalva wants.

The only thing Grijalva productively does is abundantly demonstrate that the way Congressional districts are drawn is very broken and needs overhauling NOW!

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